10 Fascinating Facts About Davy Crockett

Born on August 17, 1786, backwoods statesman Davy Crockett's life has often been obscured by myth. Even during his lifetime, fanciful stories about his adventures were transforming him into a buck-skinned superhero. And after his death, the tales kept growing taller. So let’s separate fact from fiction.

1. HE RAN AWAY FROM HOME AT AGE 13.

When Davy was 13, his father paid for him to go to a school. But just four days in, Davy was bullied by a bigger and older boy. Never one to back down from a fight, one day Crockett waited in a bush along the road home until evening. When the boy and his gang walked up the road, Crockett leaped from the bush and, as he later wrote in his autobiography, “set on him like a wild cat.” Terrified that the schoolmaster would whip him for beating one of the boys so severely, he decided to start playing hooky.

His father, John, was furious when a letter inquiring about his son's poor attendance showed up. Grabbing a stick, he chased after Davy, who fled. The teen spent the next few years traveling from his native Tennessee to Maryland, performing odd jobs. When he returned, Crockett’s parents didn’t recognize him at first. Following an emotional reunion, it was agreed that Davy would stick around long enough to help work off some family debts. About a year later, all these were satisfied, and Crockett left for good not long after.

2. HE NEARLY DIED IN A BOATING ACCIDENT.

After serving under General Andrew Jackson in the Tennessee militia, Crockett got into politics. Elected as a state legislator, he served two terms between 1821 and 1823. After losing his seat in 1825, Crockett chose an unlikely new profession for himself: barrel manufacturing. The entrepreneur hired a team to cut staves (the boards with which barrels are constructed) that he planned on selling in New Orleans. Once 30,000 were prepared, Crockett and his team loaded the shipment onto a pair of flatboats and traveled down the Mississippi River. There was just one problem: The shoddy vessels proved impossible to steer.

With no means of redirecting them, the one carrying Crockett ran into a mass of driftwood and began to capsize, with Crockett trapped below deck. Springing to action, his mates on the other boat pulled him out through a small opening. The next day, a traveling merchant rescued them all.

3. HE CLAIMED TO HAVE KILLED 105 BEARS IN ONE YEAR.

If his autobiography can be believed, the expert marksman and his dogs managed to kill 105 bears during a seven-month stretch from 1825 to 1826. Back then, bear flesh and pelts were highly profitable items, as were the oils yielded by their fat—and Crockett’s family often relied on ursid meat to last through the winter.

4. A SUCCESSFUL PLAY HELPED MAKE HIM A CELEBRITY.

Crockett ran for Congress in 1827, winning the right to represent western Tennessee. Four years later, a new show titled The Lion of the West wowed New York theatergoers. The hit production revolved around a fictitious Kentucky congressman named Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, whose folksy persona was clearly based on Crockett. Before long, the public grew curious about the flesh-and-blood man behind this character. So, in 1833, an unauthorized Crockett biography was published.

Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee became a bestseller—much to its subject’s chagrin. Feeling that Sketches distorted his life’s story (although, to be fair, it began, “No one, at this early age, could have foretold that he was ever to ride upon a streak of lightning, receive a commission to quiet the fears of the world, by wringing off the tail of a comet,” so it's unlikely anyone thought it was a straight biography), the politician retaliated with an even more successful autobiography the very next year.

When The Lion of the West came to Washington, Crockett finally watched the play that started it all. That night, actor David Hackett was playing Col. Wildfire. As the curtain rose, he locked eyes with Crockett. They ceremoniously bowed to each other and the crowd went wild.

5. HE RECEIVED A FEW RIFLES AS POLITICAL THANK YOU GIFTS.

Over the course of his life, Crockett wielded plenty of firearms; two of the most significant were named “Betsy.” Midway through his state assembly career, he received “Old Betsy,” a .40-caliber flintlock presented to him by his Lawrence county constituents in 1822 (today, it can be found at the Alamo Museum in San Antonio). At some point during the 1830s, Crockett’s congressional tenure was rewarded with a gorgeous gold-and-silver-coated gun by the Whig Society of Philadelphia. Her name? “Fancy Betsy.”

If you’re curious, the mysterious woman after whom these weapons were christened was either his oldest sister or his second wife, Elizabeth Patton.

6. HE PUT A LOT OF EFFORT INTO MAINTAINING HIS WILD IMAGE.

By John Gadsby Chapman - Art Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin., Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

For somebody who once called fashion “a thing I care mighty little about,” Crockett gave really detailed instructions to portraitists. Most likenesses, the politician complained, made him look like “a sort of cross between a clean-shirted Member of Congress and a Methodist preacher.” For the portrait above—arguably the world’s most dynamic painting of Crockett, as rendered by the esteemed John Gadsby Chapman—Crockett asked the artist to portray him rallying dogs during a bear hunt. Crockett purchased all manner of outdoorsy props and insisted that he be shown holding up his cap, ready to give “a shout that raised the whole neighborhood.”

7. HE COMMITTED POLITICAL SUICIDE BY SPEAKING OUT AGAINST ANDREW JACKSON'S NATIVE AMERICAN POLICY.

Andrew Jackson was a beloved figure in Tennessee, and Crockett’s vocal condemnation of the President’s 1830 Indian Removal Act didn’t win him many friends back home. “I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure,” the congressman later asserted, “and that I should go against it, let the cost against me be what it might.” He then narrowly lost his 1831 reelection bid to William Fitzgerald, who was supported by Jackson. In 1833, Crockett secured a one-term congressional stint as an anti-Jacksonian, after which he bid Tennessee farewell, famously saying, “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.”

8. HE REALLY DID WEAR A COONSKIN HAT (SOMETIMES).

Harry Kerr/BIPs/Getty Images

Walt Disney’s Davy CrockettTV serialtriggered a national coonskin hat craze in the 1950s. Suiting up for the title role was square-jawed Fess Parker, who was seldom seen on-camera without his trusty coonskin cap. Children adored Davy’s rustic hat and, at the peak of the show's popularity, an average of 5000 replicas were sold every day.

But did the historical Crockett own one? Yes, although we don’t know how often he actually wore it. Some historians argue that, later in life, he started donning the accessory more often so as to capitalize on The Lion of the West (Col. Wildfire rocked this kind of headgear). One autumn morning in 1835, the frontiersman embarked upon his journey to Texas, confident that the whole Crockett clan would reunite there soon. As his daughter Matilda later recalled, he rode off while “wearing a coonskin cap.” She’d never see him again.

9. THERE'S SOME DEBATE ABOUT HIS FALL AT THE ALAMO.

It's clear that Crockett was killed during or just after the Battle of the Alamo in 1836—but the details surrounding his death are both murky and hotly-contested. A slave named Joe claimed to have spotted Crockett’s body lying among a pile of deceased Mexican soldiers. Mrs. Suzannah Dickinson (whose husband had also been slain in the melee) told a similar story, as did San Antonio mayor Francisco Ruiz.

On the flip side, The New Orleans True American and a few other newspapers reported that Crockett was actually captured and—once the fighting stopped—executed by General Santa Anna’s men. In 1955, more evidence apparently surfaced when a long-lost diary written by Lieutenant Colonel José Enrique de la Peña saw publication. The author writes of witnessing “the naturalist David Crockett” and six other Americans being presented to Santa Anna, who promptly had them killed.

Some historians dismiss the document as a forgery, but others claim that it’s authentic. Since 2000, two separate forensics teams have taken the latter position. However, even if de la Peña really did write this account, the famous Tennessean still might have died in combat beforehand—perhaps the Mexican officer mistook a random prisoner for Crockett on the day in question.

10. DURING SPORTING EVENTS, A STUDENT DRESSED LIKE CROCKETT RALLIES UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE FANS.

Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

Smokey the hound dog might get all the attention, but the school has another mascot up its sleeve. On game days, a student known simply as “the Volunteer” charges out in Crockett-esque regalia, complete with buck leather clothes, a coonskin cap, and—occasionally—a prop musket.

13 Fascinating Facts About Nina Simone

Nina Simone, who would’ve celebrated her 86th birthday today, was known for using her musical platform to speak out. “I think women play a major part in opening the doors for better understanding around the world,” the “Strange Fruit” songstress once said. Though she chose to keep her personal life shrouded in secrecy, these facts grant VIP access into a life well-lived and the music that still lives on.

1. Nina Simone was her stage name.

The singer was born as Eunice Waymon on February 21, 1933. But by age 21, the North Carolina native was going by a different name at her nightly Atlantic City gig: Nina Simone. She hoped that adopting a different name would keep her mother fromfinding out about her performances. “Nina” was her boyfriend’s nickname for her at the time. “Simone” was inspired by Simone Signoret, an actress that the singer admired.

2. She had humble beginnings.

Getty Images

There's a reason that much of the singer's music had gospel-like sounds. Simone—the daughter of a Methodist minister and a handyman—was raised in the church and started playing the piano by ear at age 3. She got her start in her hometown of Tryon, North Carolina, where she played gospel hymns and classical music at Old St. Luke’s CME, the church where her mother ministered. After Simone died on April 21, 2003, she was memorialized at the same sanctuary.

3. She was book smart ...

Simone, who graduated valedictorian of her high school class, studied at the prestigious Julliard School of Music for a brief period of time before applying to Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Unfortunately, Simone was denied admission. For years, she maintained that her race was the reason behind the rejection. But a Curtis faculty member, Vladimir Sokoloff, has gone on record to say that her skin color wasn’t a factor. “It had nothing to do with her…background,” he said in 1992. But Simone ended up getting the last laugh: Two days before her death, the school awarded her an honorary degree.

4. ... with the degrees to prove it.

Simone—who preferred to be called “doctor Nina Simone”—was also awarded two other honorary degrees, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Malcolm X College.

5. Her career was rooted in activism.

Gerrit de Bruin

At the age of 12, Simone refused to play at a church revival because her parents had to sit at the back of the hall. From then on, Simone used her art to take a stand. Many of her songs in the '60s, including “Mississippi Goddamn,” “Why (The King of Love Is Dead),” and “Young, Gifted and Black,” addressed the rampant racial injustices of that era.

Unfortunately, her activism wasn't always welcome. Her popularity diminished; venues didn’t invite her to perform, and radio stations didn’t play her songs. But she pressed on—even after the Civil Rights Movement. In 1997, Simone told Interview Magazine that she addressed her songs to the third world. In her own words: “I’m a real rebel with a cause.”

6. One of her most famous songs was banned.

“Mississippi Goddam,” her 1964 anthem, only took her 20 minutes to an hour to write, according to legend—but it made an impact that still stands the test of time. When she wrote it, Simone had beenfed up with the country’s racial unrest. Medger Evers, a Mississippi-born civil rights activist, was assassinated in his home state in 1963. That same year, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a Birmingham Baptist church and as a result, four young black girls were killed. Simone took to her notebook and piano to express her sentiments.

Some say that the song was banned in Southern radio stations because “goddam” was in the title. But others argue that the subject matter is what caused the stations to return the records cracked in half.

7. She never had a number one hit.

Nina Simone released over 40 albums during her decades-spanning career including studio albums, live versions, and compilations, and scored 15 Grammy nominations. But her highest-charting (and her first) hit, “I Loves You, Porgy,” peaked at #2 on the U.S. R&B charts in 1959. Still, her music would go on to influence legendary singers like Roberta Flack and Aretha Franklin.

8. She used her style to make a statement.

Head wraps, bold jewelry, and floor-skimming sheaths were all part of Simone’s stylish rotation. In 1967, she wore the same black crochet fishnet jumpsuit with flesh-colored lining for the entire year. Not only did it give off the illusion of her being naked, but “I wanted people to remember me looking a certain way,” she said. “It made it easier for me.”

9. She had many homes.

New York City, Liberia, Barbados, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands were all places that Simone called home. She died at her home in Southern France, and her ashes were scattered in several African countries.

10. She had a famous inner circle.

During the late '60s, Simone and her second husband Andrew Stroud lived next to Malcolm X and his family in Mount Vernon, New York. He wasn't her only famous pal. Simone was very close with playwright Lorraine Hansberry. After Hansberry’s death, Simone penned “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” in her honor, a tribute to Hansberry's play of the same title. Simone even struck up a brief friendship with David Bowie in the mid-1970s, who called her every night for a month to offer his advice and support.

11. You can still visit Simone in her hometown.

In 2010, an 8-foot sculpture of Eunice Waymon was erected in her hometown of Tryon, North Carolina. Her likeness stands tall in Nina Simone Plaza, where she’s seated and playing an eternal song on a keyboard that floats in midair. Her daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, gave sculptor Zenos Frudakis some of Simone’s ashes to weld into the sculpture’s bronze heart. "It's not something very often done, but I thought it was part of the idea of bringing her home," Frudakis said.

12. You've probably heard her music in recent hits.

Rihanna sang a few verses of Simone’s “Do What You Gotta Do” on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo. He’s clearly a superfan: “Blood on the Leaves” and his duet with Jay Z, “New Day,” feature Simone samples as well, along with Lil’ Wayne’s “Dontgetit,” Common’s “Misunderstood” and a host of other tracks.

13. Her music is still being performed.

Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone was released along with the Netflix documentary in 2015. On the album, Lauryn Hill, Jazmine Sullivan, Usher, Alice Smith, and more paid tribute to the legend by performing covers of 16 of her most famous tracks.

When you think of Dirty Dancing, or even just hear the first strains of "(I've Had) The Time of My Life," you probably think of a single image: Jennifer Grey, in her diaphanous pink dress, being triumphantly lifted toward the heavens by the Adonis-like dance instructor played by the late Patrick Swayze.

Since its release in 1987, Dirty Dancing has remained a beloved mainstay for scores of fans, earning it a place in the popular film canon and endless re-showings on basic cable. Even dedicated fans, however, may be missing out on a fundamental aspect of the film that’s never directly addressed: its Jewish roots.

The movie’s setting, Kellerman's, is based on the numerous all-inclusive vacation spots aimed at Jewish travelers that dotted the upstate New York landscape throughout much of the 20th century—a constellation of resorts commonly known as the Borscht Belt. (The term was coined by Variety writer Abel Green as a reference to the hearty Eastern European soup that was ubiquitous on these hotels' menus.)

For the purposes of appealing to a broader audience, most references to the Jewish identity of resorts like Kellerman's were expunged from the movie. Still, even without many explicit references to Jewish life, Dirty Dancing—written by seasoned resort-goer Eleanor Bergstein—managed to get a lot of things right about the Borscht Belt. While the average viewer might not notice them, there are numerous nods to this resort culture embedded in the film.

Before grandiose resorts like the ones that inspired Kellerman's existed, enterprising Jewish families opened boarding houses in the Catskill Mountains during the early 20th century. Known as kucheleins, these bucolic locations were moderately priced respites for tenement-dwelling New Yorkers looking to beat the heat. The houses had communal kitchens, where fresh milk was the beverage of the day, thanks to the dairy farms prevalent in the area. (We'll come back to that later.)

Eventually, as Jewish families became more affluent—and these boarding houses became more successful—many of them expanded into sprawling resorts. And word got around that these sumptuous hotels were the places to see and be seen. The best known of them, including Grossinger's, Kutsher's, and the Concord, became institutions. Grossinger's alone counted Eleanor Roosevelt, Judy Garland, Jayne Mansfield, and Milton Berle among its guests. Debbie Reynolds married Eddie Fisher at the hotel in 1955 (Fisher had been discovered there). Meanwhile, Kutsher's Country Club once welcomed stand-up comedians like Joan Rivers, Andy Kaufman, and Jerry Seinfeld (and employed a pre-NBA Wilt Chamberlain as a bellhop).

But there was a darker reason these elegant, upstate New York hotels were so popular with Jewish travelers beyond their boundless kosher meals. Anti-Semitism in the United States was an unfortunate, widespread fact of life for the first half of the 20th century, and many vacation spots throughout the country were "restricted," meaning Jews were not welcome. The Catskills resorts of the Borscht Belt offered an upscale experience without the risk of being turned away.

In the world of Dirty Dancing, outright mentions of Jewish culture are almost nonexistent. At best, several of the characters are reduced to borderline-lazy tropes in order to get the point across that they are Jewish without having to explicitly say it. Marjorie Houseman (Kelly Bishop) is a stereotypical Jewish mother, and Lisa Houseman (Jane Brucker) is a stereotypical a "Jewish American Princess."

And yet, even without mentioning religion, Dirty Dancing hits many aspects of the Borscht Belt experience spot-on.

Take, for instance, the mambo obsession that sweeps through Kellerman's in the movie, which takes place during the summer of 1963. It's not fictional in the slightest. In It Happened in the Catskills, an oral history of Borscht Belt culture, there are multiple descriptions of the mambo craze that prevailed in the 1950s and early 1960s.

One of the best accounts of the time comes from Jackie Horner, who served as a consultant on Dirty Dancing. Like the film's character Penny Johnson (Cynthia Rhodes), Horner was a Rockette for a time, and from 1954 to 1986, she taught dancing at Grossinger's. "All of us could do the routines that Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey did in Dirty Dancing," she said. "In fact, I used to bring the watermelon plugged with vodka to our staff parties just like in the movie."

As she explained, "every hotel, big or small, had a resident dance team" whose schedules were jam-packed with lessons and performances from sunup to sundown: "At 9:30 we started teaching, and we kept going until 6 o'clock, when we'd break for dinner. At 7, on a full stomach, we'd go right into dance rehearsal. At 9, we'd change into costumes for our 10 o'clock show. Then we'd dance with our pupils from 11 to 1."

Some of those pupils were indeed the "bungalow bunnies," like Dirty Dancing's bored housewife Vivian Pressman (Miranda Garrison). "The husbands only came up on weekends, so it was party time for them Monday through Friday," said Horner. "They took dance lessons from the male instructors during the day. At night, after the show, the male instructors came back to dance with the pupils. They kept themselves busy around the clock."

Another thing Dirty Dancing got right? The resorts' practice of hiring college students for summer and holiday gigs. He may have been the "villain" of the movie, but medical students like the weaselly waiter Robbie Gould (Max Cantor) were commonplace around the Borscht Belt. It was a win-win situation for many of these part-time workers. As Tania Grossinger wrote in her bookGrowing Up at Grossinger's, "In the summer, many college students applied for jobs as busboys, waitresses, or bellhops, where they could conceivably make $1500 a season in tips and salary, have virtually no expenses, and have a heck of a good time to boot."

And the film's love story is realistic, too. Those hotels were great places for matchmaking. My existence can attest to that. My parents met at the Raleigh Hotel in South Fallsburg, New York, over the Passover holiday in 1967. In a story that vaguely echoes that of Frances "Baby" Houseman (Grey) and Johnny Castle (Swayze), my father was working his way through college as a busboy and my mother was a high school junior, vacationing at the resort with her family. Years later, my extended family started a 15-year tradition of spending Passover in the mountains.

Unfortunately, the film also accurately alluded to the Borscht Belt's decline. Though some families—my own included—kept frequenting these resorts, even by the 1960s, these destinations were starting to lose their luster.

At the end of Dirty Dancing, resort owner Max Kellerman (Jack Weston) laments to bandleader Tito Suarez (Charles "Honi" Coles) that times are changing. The exchange is easy to overlook because it takes place mere seconds before Swayze's immortal "nobody puts Baby in a corner" line. But if you listen carefully, it becomes clear that Kellerman is the voice of a dying generation—and of a dying culture.

Max Kellerman: "You and me, Tito. We've seen it all. Bubba and Zeyda [ed. note: Yiddish for grandmother and grandfather] serving the first pasteurized milk to the boarders. Through the war years when we didn't have any meat, through the Depression when we didn't have anything."

Tito Suarez: "Lots of changes, Max. Lots of changes."

Max Kellerman: "It's not the changes so much this time, Tito. It's that it all seems to be ending. You think kids want to come up here with their parents to take foxtrot lessons? Trips to Europe, that's what the kids want. Twenty-two countries in three days. It feels like it's all slipping away.”

Max Kellerman's realization that his resort is no longer the hotspot it was a decade or two earlier is on-point. (As is his reference to the ubiquity of milk at those boarding houses.) By the 1960s, air travel had become more reasonably priced, and restricted vacation locales were becoming a non-issue, especially after the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964.

And with the culture shift of the late '60s hovering over these Borscht Belt resorts like an ominous cloud, it would become less and less likely that kids would be interested in coming up to the Catskills to take foxtrot lessons alongside their parents. Listen, Baby may have been all-in when it came to doing the mambo or grinding up on Johnny to "Cry to Me," but who's to say she'd still want to cha-cha-cha with him once she got a whiff of what John, Paul, George, and Ringo had to offer when Beatlemania hit the U.S. a few months later?

Max's melancholy observation was a harbinger of what was to come. Nowadays, these palatial hotels are nonexistent. The ones that still stand either cater to an ultra-Orthodox clientele (as in the case of the Raleigh) or, like Grossinger's, exist in a state of perpetual ruin.

Dirty Dancing may live on in our hearts and our memories (or rather, "voices, hearts, and hands") through streaming services like Netflix and endless cable reruns. But without some effort, the history of hotels like Kellerman's might be forgotten.

So maybe next time Dirty Dancing has its 5785th airing on TBS, before Baby and Johnny take the stage for the time of their lives once again, have a little sympathy for Max Kellerman's kvetching. Because believe it or not, there was a time, to quote Miss Frances Houseman, "before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came," when a joint like Kellerman's was a pretty cool place to hang.